INDIA, FOR THE PLAIN HELL OF IT

JOURNALS about writer's visit, in 1952, to his estranged homeland of India; writer describes a nightmarish visit to Ajanta Caves... LONDON, 1952 I am going back to India. I expect to return. I am leaving all my things--books, manuscripts, clothes, everything. I can truthfully say that all my ambitions and expectations from this city have been fulfilled. Yet, I am not happy. This is a defeat. I am ashamed to admit it to anyone... BOMBAY We have arrived in India. I have gone to live with two Indian millionaires for a fortnight... The feeling of guilt is with me all the time. Everything implicates. A beggar on the road--as I write this note--is making noise. He has a woman with him and she has a child in her arms. It is made to cry all the time. (A device to make infants and children scream and attract sympathy is to burn their mouths with chili powder. If the mouth is no longer sensitive, then glans penis, the anus, the vagina, and the eyes are so treated.) ...I might be living in the isolation ward or the morgue of a hospital--as a helpless onlooker... He was invited to visit Ajanta Caves by the Partner of the millionaires... When he met them at the railway station he was asked to accompany the Partner to a crematorium, where he was given charge of a tin containing the ashes of the Partner's aunt. Neither the Partner nor his son-in-law wanted to carry the ashes, so writer carried them... They got off the train at 1:25 a.m. in order to consign the ashes to the nearest holy river... Describes the scene of filth on the bank... Their next stop was a dharamshala, a pilgrims' rest house, built by the charitable for the convenience of pilgrims... I could not escape the conclusion that the Partner, his dead, the Brahmins, and all the other people about me (and I) have decided to seek [God] in Excreta rather than in the clouds... Writer visited a Shiva temple alone and found in beautiful... Describes his visit to Janta Caves with the Partner, who was crass at every turn, ruining the beauty of the caves with his comedic commentary... Later, writer read his forwarded mail while waiting on a queue in a railway station... A letter was from the Vice-President of India, Dr. Radhakrishnan, expressing pleasure that I was in India. These letters made me realize a truth about our situation. We are all mad. If there is any difference between the Partner and myself, and the son-in-law and myself, it is only of degree. I imagine myself a man of reason, yet I cannot think what I am doing here, in India, in this third-class queue, unless it is for the plain hell of it.

Under the southern portion of the city exists its negative image: a network of more than two hundred miles of galleries, rooms, and chambers.

As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.